Seniors taking big hit

Warren A. SmithPenn Township

October 9, 2012Letters to the Editor

The status of the financial crisis is that senior citizens are being disproportionately robbed of their lifetime savings by an accelerating inflation engineered by the Federal Reserve to reward the financially irresponsible lending institutions and their cohorts in crime who now are having their delinquent mortgages paid by the taxpayers.

This together with the Fed printing money to push down both long- and short-term interest rates has created a financial crisis for the senior citizen living on a fixed income.

The Ben Bernanke response to this financial train wreck for seniors was essentially, “If seniors lack the funds to purchase real estate or some other asset to keep up with inflation, ‘let them eat cake.’ ”

Bernanke engineered this inescapable risk of inflation and was rewarded by a presidential nomination to another four-year term as Federal Reserve chairman.

Responding to this gift from the administration, Bernanke accelerated the printing presses to further devalue the dollar by adding $85 billion per month to the money supply, to allow taxpayers to buy up more bad debts from the greedy institutions that profited from the crisis they created.

Our financial reality is that both wages and business taxes have to be reduced in the United States to be competitive in the global markets. Direct intervention to accomplish this imperative is career suicide for elected politicians.

As a result, businesses in the United States are continuing to move offshore to avoid bankruptcy and to competitively participate in global markets.

This is not an option for some businesses such as farming and steelmaking because of having large fixed assets.Informed management of the free enterprise system served to make the U.S. the most successful economic model in the world. The current administration now wants to apologize for this success and replace it with a socialist model that never has produced the prosperity or security for its citizens that is taken for granted in our great country.